Failing Gloriously and Other Essays

by Shawn Graham, Eric C Kansa (Contributor), Neha Gupta (Contributor)

Failing Gloriously and Other Essays documents Shawn Graham’s odyssey through the digital humanities and digital archaeology against the backdrop of the 21st-century university. At turns hilarious, depressing, and inspiring, Graham’s book presents a contemporary take on the academic memoir, but rather than celebrating the victories, he reflects on the failures and considers their impact on his intellectual and professional development. These aren’t heroic tales of overcoming odds or paeans to failure as evidence for a macho willingness to take risks. They’re honest lessons laced with a genuine humility that encourages us to think about making it safer for ourselves and others to fail.A foreword from Eric Kansa and an afterword by Neha Gupta engage the lessons of Failing Gloriously and consider the role of failure in digital archaeology, the humanities, and social sciences.

Genres: Nonfiction

159 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

Reviews

[kim · Rating 3 out of 5]

An inspiring read as I sludge through my overdue thesis’ literature review at 3am and started wondering if I’m competent in anything.

read for Reading Challenge Champs: TBR Knockout !
Prompt: Book “bought” 6 months ago (I got this for free cause one of my former profs wrote it

[Kai Weber · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book won the 2019 Digital Humanities Awards in the category "Best Exploration of Failure". It is a great achievement to have an academic awards with such a category. It is great to boost the activity of failure exploration, as you know from all the trite, but true statement about learning from mistakes. Yet reading this book from front to back is a rather barren effort. The author collected blog posts or conference talks from a time period of nearly two decades and tries to link them with some glue text that uses the term "to fail gloriously" in every third sentence. (Another word with a tedious frequency of re-occurrance is the "impostor".) You don't explore anything if you state all the time that you want to explore it. The author introduces two different typologies of failures (Croxall / Warnick and Dombrowski), yet besides referring to them here and there, he does not really use them as a vehicle for enlightenment of the failures mentioned in the book. Overall it is unsystematic, the alleged collection principle of "essays exploring failures in academia" is not bearing out, the texts seem randomly put together and stylistically diverse, not to say, not sounding well to my - allegedly non-native speakers' - ears.
So my conclusion would be: Great that the author raises the awareness for the topic. Let's count this volume as another important failure on the route that is necessary to be taken.

[Steven Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book! I learned a lot about the digital humanities, as well as what it means to take and learn from real risks related to one's research and academic career. I especially found Graham's writing on underemployment refreshing and inspiring.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous, funny, and honest account of failing productively in higher education, trying again, and eventually finding some measure of success. Great for professional development seminars.